To simultaneously participate, observe and process history through all of one’s biases is a difficult task. To do so during late nights, in dark, sensorially overwhelming clubs, keeping all of one’s faculties intact makes it more so. It may be why real-time critical context for club music has always been rare. Yet what Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor makes acutely obvious, as both volume and prism, is not just the cultural value of the city’s party scene, but how it also serves as a moral compass – and how it still can.